SchneiderWeb

For the past two weeks the Korean media have focused on one story to the exclusion of all others: the sinking of the Sewol ferry, in which 302 people--the majority of them high school students on a school trip--perished needlessly. The story of the tragedy kept even Obama's visit to Korea from the lead headline. The tragedy has caused Korea, a nation already profoundly concerned with how it is perceived internationally, to become deeply self critical. From the cowardice and criminality of the captain and crew, who told the passengers to stay put while they abandoned ship, to the tragically slow and inadequate initial response of rescuers, to the chaotic and combative rescue effort in the subsequent days involving multiple government agencies, to the inappropriate and opportunistic remarks and actions of political figures and their children, to the pervasive corruption of government regulatory agencies that allowed a substandard, overweight ferry to pass inspection, to the at times ...

So the church where I work is located on the campus of a girls' middle and high school. What is our parking lot on Sunday morning doubles as their field for physical education. Since the weather has been a little warmer of late, the school's PE class has moved outdoors. Looking out the window of my office the other day I saw the students lined up in military formation. I wondered if it was some sort of drill. It turns out they were doing calisthenics, which I assume constituted their PE class. It's a far cry from what students in America experience, or at least what I did. Where's the dodgeball? Regimentation and order pervade Korean society. Meetings begin at a set time regardless of whether everyone is there. People fall into their place in society based on their age, gender, family background, level of education, and perhaps most importantly--place of education. The annual college placement exam is the most important event in a high school student's life to th...

Every Tuesday the pastors here go out for lunch together. Yesterday we visited a restaurant owned by a church member. The restaurant's specialty is a dish known as boshintang (보신탕), which is...well...dog stew. I thought that eating dog "meat" was confined to the more rural areas of Korea, but this restaurant was in the middle of Gangnam, one of the busiest districts of Seoul. Bottom line--no, I did not partake--the restaurant offered other dishes. Only a particular type of dog is raised for its "meat," or so I've read. In Korean they are called nureongi (누렁이), which is slang for "yellow one." They are mid-sized spitz-type dogs that look a lot like the Jindo, a dog native to Korea that Koreans revere for its intelligence and loyalty. Dog ownership is becoming quite common in Seoul, especially among younger Koreans, so I hope that Koreans find it increasingly difficult to distinguish dogs that sit on a couch from those that sit on a plate. ...

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis is not among my favorite books, but in it he does highlight one eternal truth: some people prefer a self-inflicted, self-contained misery to an experience of grace. As an extremely brief synopsis, the main character is taken on an eschatological bus ride, during which he meets many fellow travelers, each of whom carries a perpetual cloud of cantankerousness over themselves. The bus departs from a land of dreary grays and eventually arrives at what is basically the Microsoft Windows wallpaper--rolling hills, green fields, blue skies--rich colors and lush scenery all around. Despite the improvement in their surroundings, his fellow travelers continue to find things to complain about. In fact, their bodies cannot physically adjust to the beauty of their new surroundings. While wandering through the greenery they discover that they are, in fact, ghosts who lack corporeal bodies. They cannot acclimate to the weightiness, the substantiveness of this new rea...

It has been six months to the day since I arrived in Korea. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point during those six months I crossed the threshold from visitor to resident. Korean society is a dichotomy when it comes to foreigners. Korean parents want their children to learn English, so the public schools and after-school educational centers are filled with teachers who are native English speakers. Yet the culture overall is not accommodating of foreigners. No one at the immigration office speaks English; most foreigners I saw there had a Korean friend to help them navigate the byzantine bureaucracy. Opening a cellular account is more complicated than taking out a mortgage in the States. And what Koreans consider pizza is unrecognizable--a mass of dough and cheese with no tomato sauce and topped with corn and sweet potatoes. I don't know whether I will ever consider Seoul "my city" in the way that I still do New York, even though it's been fo...

I have always believed in going native when visiting, and especially living in, a foreign country, attempting to live like a local as much as possible. Here in Seoul that has meant riding my bike to church, eating Korean food every meal of every day ( every day), and speaking almost passable Korean in short bursts. Most of these measures are born of a desire to fit in and a respect for the culture. Yet one measure I've taken is purely out of self-preservation. More often than not I wear a surgical mask whenever I am outdoors. Seemingly every day the nightly news features warnings of air pollution for the following day. The pollution emanates from China and is a product of the fact that everything in the world is made there. Known in Korean as mesae munji (미세먼지), or microscopic dust--a name that sounds far too cute for a poisonous industrial cocktail--the dust is composed of microscopic particles of metals used in heavy industry--lead, cadmium, nickel, and others I'm probab...